Optimal Placement of UAV-Assisted Amplify-and-Forward Relays for Mitigation of Pointing Error in Optical Wireless Backhaul

The angular instability of unmanned-aerial-vehicle (UAV) relays as well as the turbulence-induced beam wander may lead to significant pointing error in free-space optical backhaul. The hop distance between each relay in a serial relay scheme is an important parameter that can be optimized in order to enhance the performance of the system. In this study, we have optimized the error and outage probabilities as a function of the hop distance vector for amplify-and-forward relays (AF) under a number of constraints such as the maximum and average relay power and the maximum relay gain. We have discovered that for the unconstrained optimization problem, the optimum hop distances is a strictly increasing sequence for both the error and outage probabilities. For maximum power constraint optimization, the optimum hop distances form a strictly increasing sequence, whereas for maximum gain constraint optimization, the optimum hop distances lead to a nondecreasing sequence.